Folha de S. Paulo offers all kind of innovative ads in its pages

Interview with Marcelo Benez, Advertising Director of Folha de S. Paulo

IFRA: Folha de S. Paulo offers some unique advertising formats to their costumers. How did this idea come out and how was it accepted by the marketing, editorial and production departments?

Marcelo Benez: Folha de S. Paulo has been working on these issues from the end of the 80’s decade. These ideas have come out to gradually satisfy the development of newspaper’s needs in order to keep updated. As you may imagine, marketing, editorial and production departments have different reactions: as far as marketing concerns, they always have positive reactions. Now, from the production department’s point of view it is regarded as an additional task to be accomplished, which involves at some extent manual work. One of Folha de S. Paulo’s editorial department’s concerns is to avoid readers being mislead up to a point that they cannot clearly establish the difference between an ad and a piece of news.

IFRA: Which kind of advertisements possibilities do you offer to your clients?

M. Benez: We have, among others, different and very innovative advertising formats, such as:
> Folha Gigante, which is an ad of eight connected pages on special paper.
> Folha Gigante Duplo, which is an ad of 16 connected pages with a size of 108 centimetres x 120 centimetres.
> Folha Origami, which has a pop-up folds that stand out in the readers’ eye.
> Maxifolha, which is printed in standard format on couché paper, with a special satin coating.
> Folha Weekly, which allows an advertiser to publish a magazine ad in the middle of a newspaper page.

IFRA: Traditional newspapers see how websites take more and more often and in bigger amounts parts of the advertisers budgets. Do you think this kind of initiatives put the newspapers back in the media planners and agencies minds as an advertising medium they should not give up?

M. Benez: I do believe that special formats are a good way to stimulate new investments, to attract new advertisers and to keep the newspaper within the advertising agencies media plans.

IFRA: Are the investments that this kind of special advertisement may imply worth it in comparison with the amount of clients that may be interested in such initiatives?

M. Benez: Firstly I would say that Folha de S. Paulo’s investments in special advertising formats are focused on planning and developing new ideas and show them to advertising agencies and customers. Cash investments occur upon client’s advertising request.

IFRA: How has been the response of advertisers, agencies and readers to this kind of ads? Do you have any study or feedback about if readers like them or consider them intrusive or ‘not so serious’?

M. Benez: From my point of view, the fact of having our clients frequently using these special formats has been an important feedback to us. Regarding to the second part of your question, I should tell you that there is an ombudsman working for Folha de S. Paulo, who regularly gets reader’s opinions on different matters and publishes them, even if they criticize us. Considering that we have 2.6 million readers, we have only had two complaints in the last five years.

Interview conducted by Mari Pascual

Page first published: 27.06.2008